What's the current status on ISP peering/ZINX? Who is (not/) peering with who? A few years back, I knew for a fact that if the website was hosted with the 'wrong' ISP, your page would do a Zim->EU/UK->Zim round-trip , taking twice as long as internationally hosted website. So hosting locally wasn't too much of an advantage.
I feel speed is a little emphasised in the article: it's only really noticeable on the first visit or if your site is under heavy load. If the website has decent caching. I think caching has more of an impact on perceived speed that where you host your site. CloudFlare is probably an unnecessary expense if your site is targeted locally and/or your site is not under heavy load (thumb-suck: more than 30 hits per second). I am not aware of a .zw website that is that popular.